> A post considering the influence of A.A. Milne and Dr. Seuss. Conclusion: Seuss spawned thousands of awful imitators (and, on re-consideration, most of Seuss is strained and banal). Milne is in some ways the grandfather of post-postmodern American literature, starting with McSweeney’s and including David Foster Wallace and George Saunders. > A post […]

On the forearm of a cashier at the Co-op: The vegan symbol crossed with the anarchy symbol, beneath which is the legend: “no milk no masters.” (For the record: I have no tattoos.) (But “no milk no masters” is just about poetry.)

Please go here, because I can’t write separate blog posts for every smart thing in the interview or every great clip from the documentary. I was glancingly aware of Pulp when I was younger (they were not-Blur); now, later in life, it turns out that Jarvis Cocker is a freaking oracle, not to mention a […]

I wish, I wish, I wish I had been smart enough to write that line. It comes from the Simpsons; it was recently appropriated by an indie band, which is how I discovered it. And now it will be in my head for the rest of my life.

From a recent Talk of the Town piece about Wayne Thiebaud, a painter in his 90s who throughout his long career has taken as his primary subject matter the simple, the eternal dessert: pie. He recalls the advice given to him by his mentors (de Kooning, Kline, etc.): “If you’re going to paint, you’d better […]

is this letter from Godspeed You! Black Emperor in response to winning a Polaris Music Award. I think it’s brilliant: angry, sweet, sincere, sloppily poetic, political in a particularly self-aware, two-hearted, 21st-century way. I don’t know why I took so long to post it. I would post it every day, really–or I’d like to remember […]

Oh, and then Mary, in her role as smart observer of contemporary culture, said this about the Vans series, which is called “Living Off the Wall”: “Apparently only happy go-lucky people with a large peppering of ‘like’ in their vocabulary and no major activist or social agendas (aside from promoting the right to tattoo in […]

The other day Joe shared this series of films produced by Vans. I made some small noise about my discomfort with corporations co-opting artists. Tom, in his role as provocateur, asked: Isn’t this the same thing as us making a film about, say, a student majoring in the arts at Wellesley? In my role as […]